Walking the Western Front - from war hero to enemy alien and back again

A Japanese-Canadian soldier wins a military medal of bravery in the Battle of Hill 70 in WWI, but suffers internment in his adopted country during WWII

Photo courtesy of David Mitsui

Masumi Mitsui

Hill 70 overlooks a gloomy scene: a prison under construction, a crematorium, and in the distance, an old coal mine.

This ridge is where Masumi Mitsui won Canada’s Medal of Bravery for recovering a Lewis machine-gun and getting it back into action against the enemy in the Battle of Hill 70.

It was one of the medals he threw on the registration desk in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “What good are these?” the quiet man asked as he was forced to register for a Japanese internment camp. He had gone from Canadian war hero to enemy alien in 25 years.

Photo courtesy of David Mitsui

Masumi Mitsui as a young soldier.

Mitsui came to Canada in 1908, and travelled to Calgary to enlist in 1916. His grandson, David, says British Columbia wouldn’t let Japanese men sign up because they didn’t want to owe them the right to vote. Mitsui, the grandson of a samurai, wanted to show his patriotism to Canada.

Like all 222 Japanese Canadian volunteers, he hoped this would prove his loyalty and earn him the vote. He spoke only a little English, but better than most Japanese soldiers so he was put in charge of the Japanese men in the 10th Battalion, called The Fighting Tenth. Mitsui began as a private and ended the war as a sergeant. In 1931, after intense lobbying of the B.C. Legislature, he and other Japanese Canadian First World War veterans won the right to vote. (The rest of the Japanese Canadian population was granted the same right in 1947.)

The two-hour walk from La Bassée into Lens is miserable. Rain is blowing in all directions, there is no relief from the strong wind gusts that tear across the open fields.

Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

Approach to Hill 70, circa 2014.

People in other towns advised that Lens is a city best skipped.

“Ce n’est pas une ville propre,” they usually say.

It’s not a clean town.

Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

Hill 70 in its unlikely modern-day incarnation as a busy intersection.

The approach to town from the north is uphill for two kilometres, a gradual rise toward Hill 70 — a place that is nowadays better known for being a traffic circle near a mall.

This hill was important in war — easy to see when you’re standing at the top and looking around at the industrial outskirts of the city. In June 1917, after the Canadians had taken Vimy Ridge, British commander Douglas Haig wanted the Canadians to capture nearby Lens to relieve some pressure on Passchendaele, which was already mired in mud.

Canadian commander Arthur Currie suggested a different tactic — take this hill just north of town and own the commanding view of the fortified coal mining community, the enemy trenches and the nearby villages.

“The Germans were aware that something was happening: too many troops were in the area, too many ammunition stockpiles, too many guns,” Tim Cook writes in At the Sharp End.

“German intelligence had already determined that the troops opposite them were the Canadians, who had long been identified as an elite shock force that ‘the British Higher Command always employ for the most difficult and costly fighting.’ ”

On Aug. 15, 1917, the Canadians sent artillery and liquid fire into the German lines and overran their positions. The fighting was intense — grenades lobbed back and forth, gas, artillery.

The Canadians had limited supplies and endured 21 counterattacks. The capture of the hill “marked one of the great victories of the British expeditionary force’s 1917 campaign on the western front” reads a plaque north of the hill, near an airfield. The casualties: 9,000 Canadians, 25,000 Germans. Mitsui’s comrades died for this hill, he risked his life for it.

When he returned from the internment camp, his farm had been sold, his family’s belongings stolen, save for a samurai sword his son, George, had buried. After the Second World War, the family moved to Hamilton, where every Remembrance Day Mitsui wore his old uniform, beret and medals, and stayed home.

“He would never go to a public service. He was very bitter about being interned during WWII by the government. He never wanted to acknowledge any government services, but he wanted to honour the veterans,” says David, who remembers sitting on his grandfather’s lap and staring at the medals.

“Someday you’ll get them,” his grandfather said.

Hill 70 is likely very easy to miss if you’re in a car: there are two plaques nearby, a German pillbox in a field, and a back alley at a nearby shopping complex is named “Rue des Canadiens.”

Japanese Canadian soldiers winning the right to vote was recently approved as a national historic event, thanks to David Mitsui’s efforts. A plaque commemorating the event will one day be alongside the Japanese Canadian War Memorial cenotaph in Stanley Park.

Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

German pillbox with UNESCO certified slag heap in the background.

And Mitsui’s medals? True to his word, the grandfather bequeathed them to his grandson. Between special events like Remembrance Day, David Mitsui keeps them well protected in a safe-deposit box at his bank.

Katie Daubs blogs about her computer problems while Walking the Western Front. It's not all battlefields and cemeteries in Northern France.

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